Tuesday, December 18, 2012

How Articles Help Promote Your Business

This is a good background article (reposted here with the permission of the author) on the value of marketing your website by posting written content elsewhere on the web and linking back to your site. The author focuses on placing articles at article-focused websites, but I would venture to add that posting on blogs is likewise effective in getting the word out about your projects. The more good content you can post, the more likely that your name will come up when someone searches for your subject area on the web.

You may have heard that article marketing is one of the best web marketing strategies, one of the best ways to build credibility for your business, build traffic to your site and help your rank in the search engines, but are still unsure of exactly what article marketing is.

Simply put, article marketing is writing short articles on a topic of interest to people who would be interested in your products and services, then posting them on one of the article directories, such as EzineArticles. The articles do not need to be long. In fact, around 400 words is a perfect length. In that amount of space, you can present good information to the reader and present yourself in a good light so the reader will want to know more about you.

Be conscious of what information people will be searching for when deciding on topics for you articles. You can do research at Google; simply search for Google Keyword Tool. It is a great resource and is free to use. Find search phrases that people are using to find information on the Internet. When you have found one or two that has reasonable amount of usage, use that phrase in the title of your article, in the first paragraph of the article and once or twice throughout the article. This way, when people are searching for information on that subject, there is a much better chance they'll find your article.

Having good information is vital. If someone reads your article and it is just an advertising for your services, they won't be interested at all. (In fact, most of the article directories will reject that type of article. That makes sense. They want useful content on their site.) The place to talk about you and your business is in the "resource box" at the bottom of the article.

Just like a good article will make the reader want to know more about you, a good resource box will make them click through to see what you have to offer. In the resource box, include a bit of information about you and or your company, and offer something of value if they click on the link to your site, such as a free report, video or audio with more information on the topic. Another great practice is to use "anchor links" in your resource box. What this means is, instead of just putting the web link there, use good key words and make that the link. This will help give your site authority with the search engines.

Geoff Hoff has spent his life studying creativity and the last several years studying marketing. He teaches people to reawaken their own creativity and then to bring that creativity to their business.

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